How to Make WordPress Posts and Pages Private

There could be times when you want to publish a piece of content that’s not available for the general public, but only for your eyes or for the users that have access and proper permission (Editors and Administrators) on your website.

Fortunately, WordPress has a built-in feature for this too, which allows you to make your posts and pages private.

The post or page you make private won’t appear anywhere in the article lists, and even if a normal user or a visitor somehow guesses or accidentally stumbles upon the private article’s URL, he still wouldn’t be able to see the content!

How to make a post or page private

This is very easy and straight forward. All you have to do is to create a new page or post, or edit an existing one, then go to Visibility, click on Edit, and set it to Private. Then click OK and the Update or Publish button.

Told you it was very easy! Let’s see how it looks when you or anyone with appropriate permission views the post.

As you can see, the word “Private:” appears before the post or page title.

Now let’s see what happens if I search for that link as a simple visitor, without being logged in to WordPress.

As you can see, the content was not displayed even if I inserted the correct URL for that post.

You can always edit your private post or page and make it Public, if you wish.

How to make your entire WordPress site private

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t have a built-in feature that allows you to make your entire website private, but, luckily, there are some plugins that can do that. Here are a few of them: